Found In Ceylon

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Karuna’s Culinary Wisdom

During our April break, Ginette and I took a brief holiday in Unawatuna, the touristy town set on a lovely beach just a few kilometers from Galle. Right across from the access road to our hotel was a sign advertising “Karuna’s Cooking Class.” Thanks to the New Year festivities, we had eaten our fill of amazing Sinhalese meals and, upon finding out its price of just 2,500 rupees per person, we decided we’d take her class come next month.

As circumstances would have it, our interest swelled to include five participants–all fellow volunteers in Matara clamoring to partake in the dissemination of the local cuisine–and then collapsed down to just me as everyone else fled for a day on the beach instead of in the kitchen. On the day of our class, I strolled over to Karuna’s kitchen and found a large German woman (by then, all Westerners looked large to me) who would be joining me for the class.

Karuna took us to the Galle market to buy the fruits, vegetables, and herbs we’d need. On the list was brinjal, pumpkins, beans, onions, garlic, tomatoes, curry leaves, and more.

On the road back to Unawatuna (because this road ultimately led to Matara, it was called Matara Road), we stopped at one of the many fish shacks that littered the ocean side. Karuna swiftly selected a fine slice of tuna for our fish curry.

We then proceeded to cook kokis and wellawahum, two popular teatime snacks. While we sipped our tea, consuming our creations, Karuna explained to us what exactly goes into curry powder. Then it was time to chop and stew and make seven curries (including dhaal).

By mid-afternoon, we had produced pumpkin curry, bean curry, carrot curry, pineapple curry, fish curry, fried brinjal curry, and dhaal. I was given the rest of the afternoon off to grab some sun and lead our small entourage of now-well-tanned volunteers–Ginette, Sophie, Vivian, and Denise–back to Karuna’s kitchen for dinner.

All was consumed within the half-hour. I also took the opportunity to teach Karuna some sign language before we bade her farewell.

Fast forward two and a half month later and 16,000 kilometers away in San Diego. Liz decided that on my second night back in the United States, the two of us would cook an authentic Sri Lankan dinner for the family using Karuna’s recipes. The search for exotic ingredients led us to our local Ralphs as well as the Little India shopping center in Miramar, a slice of Bollywood bumping up against a Marine Corps air base.

A few hours later, Liz and I had created a four-curry (plus papadam and lunumuris!) dinner for my parents, and there was no tempering down of the famous South Asian spiciness for my parents’ tough palates. We washed our hands, grabbed our plates, slapped red rice on them, and poured each curry onto the rice bed.

My family dug in right away with their fingers, squashing and mixing and throwing morsels into their mouths. There were few moments where I was more proud of my family than I was during that dinner. It really meant a lot to me to have them accept so completely an artifact that had been an essential part of my life for nine months–the fiery rice and curry dish.

Fortunately, you can do the same thing because I’ve finally typed up the handwritten recipe book I made during Karuna’s class. It’s actually more for Liz than anyone else, but if you’d like to try out a curry dish, here’s the 11-page cookbook. Cook away!

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The Queen Of Fruit

“When ripe the [mangosteen] fruit is as delicate and agreeably sweet as the finest lansehs and may even be mistaken for ripe grapes. It is at the same time so juicy, that many people can never eat enough of it, so delicious is its fragrance and agreeable its sweetness; and it is believed that the sick, when appetite or the power of eating has wholly gone, are nevertheless delighted with this fruit; or at least if they will not take to Mangosteens their case is indeed hopeless.”

–Georgius Everhardus Rumphius, Dutch Governor of Amboyna (1628-1702)

Virtually unseen and untasted by Westerners, the mangosteen enjoys a prominent role in a possibly apocryphal story involving Queen Victoria and a substantial reward to anyone who was able to bring back an intact mangosteen to London. Unfortunately her gustatory wishes went unfulfilled.

I was determined not to end up like Queen Victoria.

Many people close to me will know that a large part of my journey to Sri Lanka was the search for the almighty mangosteen, known as “The Queen of Fruit.” As soon as I arrived last September, I immediately asked around for the mangosteen.

“Sorry, it won’t be around until next April,” they all said. But at least once every single month, I’d inquire about the mangosteen. Maybe there was an early harvest? I kept fearing some sort of meteorological calamity which would destroy the entire 2007 mangosteen harvest and leave my dreams unrealized.

Then suddenly one night at the end of May during a bongo drum party in Polhena, Vivian said, “Oh, I just bought a couple mangosteens at the market today. They’re good!”

I already had a few too many beers by then, and as I stumbled to Sophie’s room to pass out, I vaguely remember eating one or two white wedges of mangosteen flesh and tasting its famed flavour. It is often described as a creamy combination of vanilla, strawberry, and peach.

However, the children at Rohana knew I had been waiting for mangosteens, and one student, Champika, kept telling me that she had several mangosteen trees at her home and would bring me some the first chance she had.

Well, the first chance she had–about a week after my first taste–she gave me a plastic bag with black and white stripes, containing six mangosteens. This is what happened:

I ate at least two dozen mangosteens between the end of May and when I left at the end of June. I was so sure it did not exist outside of Sri Lanka that I bought a bag of six mangosteens to take with me on the flight so friends in Thailand–Bobby and Jenny–could taste them.

Now I know that mangosteen trees thrive in many tropical areas around the Indian Ocean–Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Philippines. Attempts to cultivate them in Hawaii, California, and Florida, however, failed spectacularly, and due to fears of the Asian fruit fly, any mangosteen imports from Asia were banned by the FDA.

Until yesterday. As of 23 July, irradiated mangosteens will be allowed from Thailand, so you may get to eat your first mangosteen next summer. Irradiated, but free of fruit flies.

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Inaugurating the Benedictine Calendar

I have been back in the United States for 10 days and out of Sri Lanka for 23 days.

I remember talking with Sophie and asking her how she felt when she left after three months in Matara.

“I’d drive myself crazy. I’d keep thinking, ‘At this time, if I was back in Sri Lanka, I’d be teaching English right now. At this time, I’d be eating lunch. And so on…’”

Oddly, I don’t find myself thinking this way (although I tried). It’s a feeling of complete, utter disconnectedness from my nine-month experience.

It is as if Pope Benedict XVI has suddenly abrogated the current Gregorian Calendar and established the new Benedictine Calendar, correcting a 290-day discrepancy and making the day after 21 September 2006 not the 22nd, but instead the 8th of July, 2007.

Upon my return, I slipped into clothes and shoes that I had forgotten I owned and looked around to find everything very much the same. There are differences, of course. There’s a new dining room table; a new TV in that other room. The dog acts older than before; an framed Aboriginal Australian painting hangs in place of where the Chagall used to be. Construction people are working on a new auxiliary lane on I-5 just north of here. A few stores are gone; new ones have opened. Friends’ hairstyles have changed.

But by far, things have remained the same, so remarkably the same that I wonder how the Benedictine Calendar, with its 290-day leap into the future, could have been adopted so widely and so resolutely given our fiercely individualistic, contentious society. I drive east on Del Mar Heights Road and it is just like how I drove on it last September–actually, two weeks ago by the former Cardinal Ratzinger’s reckoning.

Which leads me to wonder with a pained heart, “Did Sri Lanka even happen?” There is so little right here, right now that answers, “Yes.”

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Now and Then, Here and There

It’s the strangest thing: to be there one day and gone the next.

And I often think back to those final days, each one of them stretched out as if they had been swollen with tears. Those faces–not just the school children but half of Matara, it felt like.

When I picked up my last batch of photographs from Nine Hearts, the woman–who knew just a little sign language because of her deaf friend–looked offended that I was leaving. “No, you’re not leaving,” she said firmly. Beneath that was a more subtle message: “How could you even think of leaving?”

But I left anyway. It doesn’t feel fair that I can go and come (and travel across Asia while at it!) and almost everybody else can’t. I’m reminded of another blogger, Samantha, from Sri Lanka who interned at a PR agency in Colombo last summer.

The thing is, I don’t believe it’s right that I have options [to leave] and they do not. But … my not taking those options does not magically empower Sri Lankans. I wish it did, and if this was so, I would have stayed…But it wasn’t so.

Still, this feeling remains with me and troubles my last waking moments of each day–the children’s faces, their eyes and smiles. And there were so many I didn’t say good-bye to; so many I didn’t grab one last vision of. A nasty virus hit the school during my last week–there were just twenty or so students remaining in the hostel by Saturday. Everyone else had gone home, most without saying good-bye to me. Sandya, Janidha, Sanjeewa, Shirantha, Dilhani, Anuradha, Supuni, Nimasha, Ishara.

Good-byes rarely play out the way you want them to, but that’s not what troubles me today. It’s the sentiments from that Nine Hearts woman–how could I even think of leaving them? Of being there, alive, breathing one day and gone, vanished, erased the next day?

Which is why I keep repeating to myself what I’m about to tell you: I’m lucky to have worked with such a great group of people at Rohana.

But more so, I know I’m lucky to work with children who trusted me so completely from the first day. Lucky to work with children who fully understand why I had to leave them one day. And luckiest of all to work with children who trust me enough to know I will come back some day.

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